Letter: What's right place for a CAFO?

What's right place for a CAFO?

While traveling in the southwest, I noticed many Contained Animal Feeding Operations. Some are extremely large, housing over 100,000 animals. The huge, car-sized hay bales are stacked like a fortress seen from miles across the prairie. Unfortunately, you can also smell the operations for miles away. This has become the mode of meat production in the U.S., an expansion of the old cattle ranch concept, but much more concentrated.

It struck me is that there were no homes or cities for dozens of miles around these factory farms. Maybe that concept is OK; an efficient, lower-cost means of meat production for the world consumer, in an area separated from waterways and communities.

I thought about the proposed CAFO in Saratoga that would place an 8,000-acre, 6,000-animal dairy operation in the middle of an existing residential/recreational area. There are about 8,000 existing property owners within striking distance of the dust, odor and noise, state-recognized trout streams, four residential lake developments, the Wisconsin Trapshooters' new facility, and an existing economy built on recreation in Rome and Saratoga.

It's such a stark comparison, a factory farm in the wide open plains with few people around, versus an existing, vibrant, recreational community forever affected by odors, dirt and noise, reduced water flow to area streams and lakes, and increased contaminants entering the groundwater.

Economics may support factory farms in an area of the country where few people live, but how can any resident, politician or bureaucracy support the degradation of an existing recreational community by this proposed CAFO? People move away from factory farms for a very good reason; they are incompatible with residential living. So why permit it in an already established residential, recreational area? Its a case of the wrong place and wrong time.

Don Ystad

Rome

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Letter: What's right place for a CAFO?

While traveling in the southwest, I noticed many Contained Animal Feeding Operations. Some are extremely large, housing over 100,000 animals. The huge, car-sized hay bales are stacked like a fortress

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